Artificial intelligence is an effective way to promote the intelligent development of education and teaching, and also an important concept of the development of quality education. This paper mainly studies the new teaching method of free combat based on artificial intelligence technology. This paper analyzes the innovation brought to education by intelligent image recognition, speech recognition, big data analysis, deep learning, intelligent teaching robot and other related technologies in the era of artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, it analyzes and discusses the influence of teaching reform in the era of artificial intelligence development. From the experimental results of this paper, it can be seen that from the perspective of students’ free combat sports skills, using artificial intelligence technology can more effectively improve students’ free combat sports skills than using conventional teaching methods to conduct elective free combat teaching. In the elective teaching of free combat in colleges and universities, the application of artificial intelligence skills can effectively improve the excellent rate and good rate, control the pass rate and reduce the failure rate of students’ examination results of free combat course.